Chapter 12 #2
What I don’t know how to survive is the habit we’re building of holding back the real things.
Waiting for a better moment. A quieter day.
A call that lasts long enough. Because those moments don’t arrive.
We just keep waiting, and the truth keeps stacking up, and eventually the weight of all the unsaid things does the damage the attacks never could.
That kind of pressure doesn’t explode. It accumulates. And by the time we feel it breaking us apart, it’s already been working for a while.
I pick up the phone to call him, and it lights up in my hand before I can dial.
Luke.
I answer on the second ring.
LUKE
She picks up on the second ring, which means she wasn't asleep.
"Hey," she says. Her voice has the quality of someone who's been awake in the dark, thinking.
"Hey, baby. Sorry. I know it's late."
"I wasn't sleeping."
I sit on the edge of my bed in the hotel room, the one Andi insisted on covering so we'd be close enough to walk to the gym, small and functional and entirely temporary. "The Commission escalated the review. Brandon told me almost two weeks ago, and I should've told you sooner."
A pause that has a specific texture—not surprise, not anger. Something that sounds like recognition.
"Okay," she says.
"I kept waiting for a better time to call."
"How did it escalate?"
I tell her what Brandon told me. She listens without interrupting, which Andi does when she's processing the facts rather than reacting out of emotion.
I can hear the bus in the background—the low hum of it moving, the acoustics of a space that's become familiar to me even though I've never been inside it.
"Anonymous supplemental complaint," she says when I finish.
"Yeah."
"That matches the donor calls. Same week as the community development inquiry to the center." Her voice is level. Not calm exactly—but definitely calibrated. "Someone is running this on a timed release."
"Yeah. That's what I think too."
"Luke." A pause. "I was about to call you."
"About what?"
"The same thing. The pattern." A brief silence. "I've been sitting with it for four days and not bringing it up. But only because our calls are so limited. I didn't want to ruin our time together with it. And then I realize—"
"That's why I was waiting too," I say.
She goes quiet.
"We're both doing it," I say.
"Yes." One word, but the weight in it is considerable. "We have to stop."
"I know."
"Tell me things when they happen," she says. Not angry. Exact. "I'm not made of glass. The waiting doesn't protect me. It just means I'm working with incomplete information." A pause. "And apparently it means I'm doing the same thing to you."
"You were about to call."
"Four days late," she says.
"Ten days late," I say.
We both take a moment to consider our situation. Then she makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh but is adjacent to one—the exhale of two people who have just caught themselves in the same mistake from opposite sides.
"What else have you been sitting on?" she asks.
"Nothing. That was it." I lean back against the headboard. "You?"
A moment's pause.
"I think the coordination is more sophisticated than a PAC holdover," she says. "I think someone is retained for this. Specifically." She doesn't say the name. She doesn't need to. "I can't prove it yet. But the pattern is too clean for someone who's improvising."
"I know," I say softly. "I've been thinking the same thing."
"Brandon trusts her."
"I know."
"So we don't move yet. We watch." Her voice has the steady precision of someone who's thought this through. "But Luke, I need you in this with me. Not protecting me from it. In it."
"I'm in it, baby. If you’re in it, I’m in your corner with you."
"Then tell me things."
"I will."
Another pause—this one different from the others. Lighter. The specific texture of two people who have said the hard thing and come out the other side still standing.
"How's training?" she asks.
"Better tonight than it has been over the last couple of weeks."
"Mack get in your head?"
"Mack got out of my head. That's a distinction worth making."
She almost laughs. I can hear the shape of it even when it doesn't fully arrive.
"Tell me something that has nothing to do with any of this," she says.
I think for a moment.
"Shane got a care package from Katie today. He pretended he wasn't moved by it. But he was visibly moved by it. Joe made him run an extra mile."
She does laugh at that—the real one, unguarded. I haven't heard it in longer than I realized.
"Tell me about the tour," I say.
She tells me about a show in Richmond where the sound system cut out for forty-five seconds during her third song.
She kept singing acoustically, and the entire room went quiet before erupting when the sound came back.
She tells me about Cami finding a record store in every city, as if it were a personal mission.
She tells me about a twelve-year-old in the front row in Richmond who knew every word of every song.
When Andi pointed at her during the bridge of the third song, she didn't scream or cry—she just pointed back, completely steady, as if they'd made a specific agreement.
Andi laughs as she tells it. She was so certain, she says.
Like she'd been waiting for that exact moment and would not waste it by being overwhelmed.
I listen to all of it.
This is what I've been shielding our window from— not the bad news, but this. The things she carries that need a place to be. Someone outside the tour to share them with, because they’re new experiences for her.
I've been so absorbed in not exceeding twenty minutes that I forgot that twenty minutes of this is more valuable than twenty minutes of enforced silence.
"Get some sleep," she says finally. Her voice has shifted—softer, less controlled. Road-tired in the way that means she's been keeping herself upright for days and is finally allowing herself not to.
"You too."
"Luke?"
"Yeah?"
“I know why you waited,” she breathes. “I know you were trying to protect our time. But I need you to stop doing that. It hurts more than it helps.”
"I know," I say. "Same goes."
A pause.
"Same goes," she agrees.
The call ends, and I sit with the phone in my hand in the small room with temporary furniture and the desert-dark outside the window.
I think about the distance between us not as miles but as a habit we've started to develop.
The bad habit of protecting the quiet moment by not putting anything true into it.
That's the thing we have to watch.
Not the big ruptures.
The small ones. The ones that feel like kindness.
ANDI
After I hang up, I sit with the phone in my lap for a while.
Outside the bus window, the mid-Atlantic darkness is doing what it does—flat and fast and punctuated by the occasional overpass light. Somewhere ahead of us, Philadelphia is assembling itself out of the highway dark.
I told him.
Not all of it—not the full arc of what I think is happening, not the name I keep not saying out loud, not the specific calculation I've been running about who has access to what information and in what sequence.
But the part that mattered tonight was shared. I was about to call you. I've been sitting on it too. We have to stop.
There's a particular weight in confessing to someone you love that you've repeated the same mistake they have. It doesn't quite bring relief; instead, it feels like two people placing the same burden on a table simultaneously and sharing a look over it.
That's where we are.
Cami appears at the end of the galley and stops when she sees my face—not alarmed, just reading.
She's learned my tells over two months of close quarters, and she knows the difference between the face I make when something has gone wrong and the face I make when something has gone right in a complicated way.
"Okay?" she says.
"Yeah," I say. And mean it in the way that accounts for the complexity.
She nods once and retreats. That's Cami. She never needs more than an honest word.
I make a fresh cup of tea—hot this time—and sit with it as Philadelphia brightens on the horizon. In a few hours, we'll load in. Soundcheck by two. Show at eight.
Luke will be up before five. He'll run his five miles in the Nevada dark before most of the facility is awake, and he'll carry the conversation the same way I'm carrying it—not resolved, not finished, but held differently than it was this morning.
That's enough.
Not everything has to be fixed tonight. Some things just have to be known together.
I open my laptop, pull up the donor communication logs one more time, and look at the pattern with fresh eyes.
Someone retained for this—someone with real operational sophistication. Someone who’s been doing this long enough that the method leaves no fingerprints, who knows exactly which threads to pull and in what order to achieve maximum damage at the optimal moment.
I add a single line to the notes document I’ve been keeping: The coordination predates Marin’s formal involvement.
I close the laptop and finish my tea.
Tomorrow I’ll tell Bill.
Tonight, it’s enough.